Pains, gains of anti-corruption crusade – The Guardian, Tuesday, November 4, 2014 Written by Abosede Musari THE Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offence Commission (ICPC) has intensified the preventive approach to curbing corruption, commenced nearly three years ago with the assumption of office of its current chairman, Mr. Ekpo Nta, who said that it was better to prevent monies from leaving government coffers than expending resources in prosecuting such suspects. He said that the provision to work at preventing corruption had always been part of the commission’s mandate. “Indeed, preventing corruption is one of the tripod pillars on which the ICPC mandate rests, the other two being public enlightenment and prosecution.” The commission, therefore, swung into action by initiating systems study review in different Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of government. More profound were the sectoral intervention that is still on-going. Already, the commission has studied over 230 MDAs where their porous systems have been plugged and funds running into several billions of Naira have been recovered for the government. Under its sectoral interventions, several government agencies have been reviewed. They include the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Bwari Area Council, Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Health Management Organisations (HMOs), National Commission for Museums and Monuments, FCT Water Board, FCT Land Administration and Abuja Geographical Information System (AGIS), National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Nigeria Prison Service, Abuja Environmental Protection Board (AEPB), National Pension Commission (PENCOM) as well as the University System where 21 fake universities have been shut and their operators charged to court. The commission has also moved to check tax fraud and is compelling companies and contractors to remit due tax to government coffers. This is achieved by vetting the contract bids of companies that seek government contracts. Contractors who are defaulting in tax payments are not only denied the opportunity to go through with the bidding process, they are also referred to the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) for appropriate action. Currently, the ICPC is working on the federal government payroll system where it has been found that ministries allegedly inflate the number of personnel in order to obtain money from government coffers. As a result of this finding, the Integrated Personnel Payroll System (IPPIS) was introduced in 2011 to ensure that the salaries of government workers are paid from a single platform, thereby giving no room for manual payments by the different MDAs. This system has exposed the rot with the manual system and MDAs are now being questioned on what they had done with the monies they got from the initial corrupt system. Nta told journalists in a recent interview that the MDAs are currently being investigated and that the commission was using the banks to track the beneficiaries of the illegal act since the monies were paid through the banks. These beneficiaries are those commonly referred to as ghost workers. Explaining how and why ghost workers were inserted into the database of MDAs, he said that, “under personnel, government would give you 100 per cent because it is for salaries, then you negotiate recurrent and capital expenditures. What a lot of agencies did was that since they know that if I claim 100 workers as my personnel, government will give me money for 100 people. But at the end of the year, you will probably discover that they were only 60. So, they used the balance for 40people either for recurrent, because they didn’t give you enough money under recurrent, or some capital projects, or helped themselves with it.” “We recovered all these monies, and we made our recommendations to the minister of finance and what has now happened is that you give me 100 staff as your entitlement, we now ask, give us their bank accounts and names. So the salaries are generated from outside of your ministry. You are not getting the money again, whatever balance left at the end of the fiscal year is not physical cash unlike in the past. The balance would be left in the Central Bank. And now we can ask you to provide explanation for the balance of the monies you have collected for personnel in previous years”, he explained. Nta added that the ICPC is currently investigating some MDAs, to bring them to account for balance of government monies they have received under inflated personnel figures in the past years. According to him, banks are involved because they are the ones paying the monies to the different accounts. The banks are also being compelled to conduct due diligence to know their customers in order to check fraud and ghost workers. He sounded a note of warning that any bank that failed to do the needful would face the music if money was discovered to have been lost to fraudulent persons. Beside the menace of ghost workers, government monies are also fleeced through ghost pensioners and the process is almost the same. Chief Emmanuel Akinola Omoyeni, National Executive Chairman of Federal Public Service Retirees has once explained in an interview with The Guardian that names were deliberately inserted in the pensioners’ database from the Head of Service, with instructions to the banks on how to pay. According to him, “during Sanni Shuaibu’s era, the mandate was issued with attached cheque from the Central Bank. The list of the people to be paid by each bank goes with the mandate. What they used to do was that the name of one pensioner can appear seven times. The first name is the original pensioner, but the other six are deliberately inserted. It’s a syndicate, the banks know about it. When a pensioner goes to the bank, he may not be paid. The banks have their overriding mandate authorising them not to make certain payments and to pay others. When they are instructed to pay, they will pay the right person, but he can only access one out of the seven”, Omoyeni said. Omoyeni was of the opinion that there is nothing like ghost workers or ghost pensioners, but that the names referred to as ghost are fabricated into the database by government officials who took the monies. He explained that the act was perpetrated in collaboration with the banks who deposit the monies in dedicated accounts where the fraudulent officials can access them. He therefore, called on the anti-graft agencies to scrutinise the process and be in charge of payment of pensioners in order to eliminate such frauds. Nta said that the systems study review had saved the government more than N14 billion in unspent balances on personnel cost of MDAs, and over N200 million cash was recovered from the MDAs as irregular payments. Two agencies were also found with N574 million in fixed deposits. The funds, he said have also been recovered. “In the pension system, scattered funds to the tune of over N23 billion in 40 bank accounts have been brought together into just four accounts; and the interest of about N470 million was also remitted to government,” he said. But the commission’s work is not without its own challenges. For instance, the agency is grossly underfunded and would have achieved more with better budgetary appropriation. For an agency that only has about 14 offices nationwide and gets just a little more than N3 billion a year, it can only do a little of the numerous tasks it is expected to perform nationwide. “I don’t think there is any agency that will tell you it has enough appropriation. We look at the magnitude of what is expected of us and I know we can do it with a bit more of funding, but like I’ve always stated, use the one you have to justify what you are looking for. We have tried to justify what we have, but there are certain basic things that must be put in place if we must move ahead,” Nta said. According to him, the commission would in addition to extra budgetary allocation, need 25 staff in each state of the federation. They should comprise of prosecutors, public enlightenment staff and investigators. This is besides the requirement for its zonal structures. The headquarters of the commission is also in need of attention. The commission’s estimate for renovation was in the range of N200 million. “This morning I was at the National Assembly to attend a public hearing. I looked at the environment of the National Assembly. It is beautiful and well maintained. If we have that kind of environment at ICPC I can assure you we will work for 24 hours,” Nta said. The chairman said that the corruption prevention strategy was also to make the business environment safe for investors. “Our anti-corruption drive is not only to say we are arresting people. It’s in our own interest that our business environment be attractive and that the foreigners believe in our laws, believe in our agencies to respond to any act of corruption from the part of our citizens”. The ICPC has so far seized 56 properties from officers of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence corps in Abuja. The properties are mostly plots of land in the Federal Capital Territory and neighbouring Nasarawa and Niger states. Others are finished buildings and cars. The commission was particularly awed by a particular staff of the corps, Mrs. Adenike Bintu Ishola who owned an estate of 60 buildings (10.9 acres) on airport road in Abuja. Based on investigation, the properties owned and controlled by Mrs. Ishola are declared excessive with regards to her emoluments and other relevant circumstances. The properties were seized alongside those of Ibrahim Raji, Mrs. Barbara Ekeocha, Mrs. Okonji Glory, Ogolo Henry, Idu Friday, Musa Izge Muhammed and Lawal Samuel. While Ekeocha owned 15 plots of land ranging from 700 square metre to 1,814 square metre in Nasarawa state and the FCT, Okonji owned eight plots ranging from 307 square metre to 1,109 square metre in the same areas. Others had between five and seven plots of different sizes. The ICPC also investigated a deputy director in the federal ministry of trade and investment, Engr. Victor Nnamdi Igboanugo, for similar alleged corruption put into property acquisition. Two houses in Sun City estate were seized from Igboanugo as well as three Toyota cars and one Hyundai jeep. Forty one officials of the National Identification Management Commission (NIMC) were arrested for possessing fake degree certificates. The Commission’s head of media, Mr. Folu Olamiti had stated that the 41 were nabbed when they applied for upgrading and presented additional qualifications they claimed to have acquired during the NIMC promotion exercise. He explained that one of the suspects presented a certificate which was “doctored” to indicate second class degree rather than the earned third class degree. He added that others presented forged certificates when they still had pending carry-overs. The commission also had to probe the complicity of those involved in the graduation of one of the suspects with a degree in engineering from an approved university who allegedly could not express himself in writing. The ICPC has also been working to put an end to examination malpractice in secondary schools through, the National Anti-Corruption Volunteers Corps (NAVC). In Akure, a school teacher, Obagboye Oluwole, who allegedly aided a female student during a WAEC examination was arrested. He was arrested following a tip off from members of the National Anti-Corruption Volunteers Corps (NAVC) Akure zone. There has also been an intervention in visa processing, thereby, eliminating situations whereby touts fleece unsuspecting visa applicants of their money. This intervention has also helped to improve the image of Nigeria in the embassies as they hardly have to deal with the presentation of fake documents by applicants. In appreciation, the Indian High Commissioner to Nigeria, Shri Ghanashyam paid a visit to the commission praising the impact of its intervention. More than 13 persons are being prosecuted for alleged presentation of fake documents at the embassy. The chairman, therefore, pledged that the commission was going to find the sources where the fake documents were printed and prosecute the operators. He warned the public to desist from patronizing touts for visa processing. The ICPC last week, secured the conviction of Acting Provost of the College of Education (Technical) Gusau, Zamfara State, Dr. Bello Shallah Ahmed. He was sentenced by the High Court of Justice in Gusau for collecting double Duty Tour Allowance (DTA) for the same trip. The offence which is punishable under Section 19 of the ICPC Act 2000, carries a five year jail term without an option of fine. ICPC, therefore, warned public officers against conferring unfair advantage upon themselves especially when they are attending meetings or during monitoring duties or oversight functions involving other government or corporate organisations.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 11:50:36 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015